Does Skill Make Us Human? by Natasha Iskander

Author:Natasha Iskander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Asif thought that it was important for workers to return to the center for training several times, ideally once a year, not to reinforce skillful practice, but to fortify workers in their ability to use their skill to protect themselves.

The social connections that workers developed during their training periods were a critical resource to this end. Workers drew on the friendships they formed at the center as a source of solidarity and support on the worksite. Every time I returned to the center, I was struck by the level of conviviality and frequency of laughter, which seemed in such sharp contrast to the grim determination required to get through the day that I observed on the jobsite. During breaks, men relaxed, drank sweet tea, and socialized in the garden, quite possibly the only green space they had access to in Qatar. The rapport between the trainers and trainees seemed easy, softened with mutual teasing.

Many of the social interactions that took place at the training center became touchstones for the scaffolders when they were back on the construction site—resources they drew on to contest exploitative practices. To take one example, the morning lectures at the training center took place in one of the air-conditioned trailers. When the lights went down for the PowerPoint presentation, it was not uncommon for some of the men to begin to doze. Robbie would jokingly order the men who had been nodding off to come to the front of the class and do a set of push-ups—to general hilarity in the room. This had become something of a trademark shtick, and the trainees ribbed one another about whether or not they had been called out to do sleepy push-ups. On construction sites, I observed former trainees using a reference to push-ups to remind tired or sleepy colleagues to renew their focus on their work, which at the heights that the scaffolders were working was critical to all for their safety. “Hey, hey! You need to do some push-ups!” was a call we often heard. On a day when Robbie went to the ABC Builders stadium site, a scaffolding foreman approached him as he was giving me a tour of a scaffolding section and used the reference to push-ups to invoke a sense of solidarity that could reach up into the company hierarchy and perhaps provide redress against the work speedup. “Boss, there are too many push-ups. Please tell them that we need to slow down.”

The training center nurtured this ethos of solidarity, rooting it in trade identity and price. Robbie repeatedly stressed that the workers were scaffolders first and their allegiance to the trade should supersede national division, or ethnic or religious resentments. Some of the strategies he used to drive home this point were humorous; Robbie screened blooper videos of scaffolders having mishaps. A fan favorite was a video of a heavyset scaffolder trying to climb up a scaffolding tube while his crew cheered him on and joked about his belly as he managed to get not more than a foot off the floor.

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